Why is the Israeli project in Jerusalem without a future?

Some may be surprised that the result is an introduction to the conversation about the future of the Israeli project in Jerusalem. The discussion here begins from the point of judging this project as an inevitable failure. But the truth that must be understood in the introduction to the discussion in this context is that historians agree that the laws of history do not change, and as long as there is a project that conflicts with the laws of history, it cannot continue or develop. A radical change must occur to it, represented by either its downfall or a change in its identity, and both cases effectively mean the end of the project, and this is the case in the Israeli project in Jerusalem.

We focus here on Jerusalem as a fundamental focus with its own specificity and nature that differs from other aspects of the project that began at the end of the 19th century and culminated in the founding of Israel in 1948. It then developed until it reached the peak of its strength in the 1980s, when Israeli tanks were entering the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Easily; Then he began to face the existential challenges that led him to the crisis he is experiencing today.

Jerusalem is at the heart of the Israeli project

First, it should be made clear that Jerusalem is theoretically considered the millstone in the Israeli project around which the idea of a national homeland for world Jews revolves. The Zionist movement that first established Israel took its name from Mount Zion in Jerusalem, and the national anthem of Israel - which was written in 1878, 70 years before its establishment - concludes with the word “Jerusalem.” It is not surprising, therefore, that Jerusalem is the subject of consensus among various segments of Israeli society, whether from a religious standpoint among religious movements, or from a historical national standpoint among secular movements.

But the presence of Jerusalem at the heart of the Israeli project does not necessarily mean that Israel will succeed in translating its centrality into practice on the ground or in changing its nature. This is because the Zionist movement’s project was based on an incorrect perception that this land (Palestine) was already empty of inhabitants. This turned out to be incorrect when the first pioneers of this project began to explore the land of Palestine and understand its nature and the possibilities of establishing a Jewish national homeland there. It later became clear to them that it is inhabited by an ancient and profound history and civilization. This is what led Jabotinsky, in the famous historical novel in the late 19th century, to send a telegram to his leaders in the Zionist movement describing Palestine by saying, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”

The same applies more clearly to the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was never devoid of indigenous people, and even when it was invaded, it remained largely within the same human groups that had always inhabited it, and its Arab character remained constant throughout history.

Ethnic cleansing failed

Historically, Israel could only do as the pioneers of the early Zionist project imagined it in one way, which was the genocidal and complete annihilation of the Palestinians. In fact, there is no relatively successful experience in human history with this concept except the experience of European colonization of North America and Australia, where a people cannot remove an entire people from the land except by literally erasing them, as the Europeans did with the indigenous people in North America and Australia between the 16th and 18th centuries. This was no longer actually possible during the 19th and 20th centuries with the social and conceptual changes that humanity experienced with the Industrial Revolution.

In other words, it can be said that Israel, as imagined by the pioneers of the Zionist movement, was established at the wrong time. Because it wanted to implement 16th century concepts in the 20th century, and this does not make sense. Therefore, the ethnic cleansing movement carried out by Zionist gangs in Palestine during the Nakba was not sufficient to completely empty the land of its population. This process proved to be unsuccessful in emptying all Palestinian lands of the indigenous population. The Palestinian citizens known today as “internal Arabs” or “internal Palestinians” remained to constitute 20% of the total population in Israel. Israel failed to completely change their identity, and over time they became a chronic headache for Israel. This was demonstrated in the events of 2021 in the Green Line areas, in which Palestinians with Israeli citizenship engaged in a violent confrontation with the occupation government and its settlers.

On the other hand, when Israel was established, it needed Jerusalem to gain religious and national legitimacy among Jewish communities around the world, and thus be able to convince them to immigrate to it, but it failed the day after its establishment in 1948 to obtain all of Jerusalem. It was satisfied with the western part of the city, which did not contain any of the sacred religious sites, but the successive Israeli governments at the time were keen to declare that its capital was Jerusalem, despite Tel Aviv’s superiority over it in economic, industrial and social terms, especially since Jerusalem is located in the heart of the conflict zone and on the borders. Directly to the armistice line. When the opportunity came for Israel to occupy East Jerusalem and annex all areas of religious importance, it did not wait a single moment, and on June 7, 1967, its army was able to storm East Jerusalem, occupy all the holy places, and tighten control over the entire city.

Pretending that Palestinians do not exist

Although the dream of a “land without people” was already over, Israel insisted on dealing with East Jerusalem with the same logic. It announced the annexation of the land without the residents, and considered the residents merely foreign residents of the city. This is because, in short, it was not able at that time to implement the dream of genocide like America and Australia in the 16th century. Nor was it even able to implement the same process of ethnic cleansing that occurred in the Nakba of 1948. She was forced to resort to the method of neglecting the presence of the Palestinian population in Jerusalem, trying to imagine a reality that does not exist, in a behavior similar to the behavior of a child who closes his eyes when afraid, thinking that what he fears does not exist.

To implement this vision, Israel resorted to pressuring Jerusalemites with measures to withdraw identities, prevent urban expansion, and other measures that aimed to push them to leave the city voluntarily in the end, considering that the only solution to the dilemma of their presence in Jerusalem. What is strange is that it acted with Jerusalem on the basis that it had already succeeded in expelling the Palestinians from it! Therefore, from the first moment of the occupation of East Jerusalem, it grouped the two parts of the city together in all its statistics to convince itself that the number of Jewish residents in the Jerusalem municipality is 3 times the Palestinian population. Which suggests that Jerusalem is a Jewish city, while forgetting that the statistics related to East Jerusalem still, to this day, give a clear numerical advantage to the Palestinians, who still constitute the overwhelming majority there. Especially in the Old City and around the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, that is, in the heart of the historic city, which is the heart of the Israeli project from the religious, national and historical aspects.

At the same time, Israel resorted to a clear distinction in services between the east and west of the city, forgetting that East Jerusalem is organically linked to the Palestinian surroundings in the West Bank and cannot be cut off from it. This policy led to the confirmation of the fact that Jerusalem is in fact two cities, even though Israel claims that it is one city. In fact, the East Jerusalem area turned into a very fragile and weak side for Israel, as most of the infiltration operations that led to armed operations in the heart of the Green Line areas passed through Jerusalem.

Failure to separate Jerusalem from its surroundings

When Israel tried to stop this by building the separation wall in 2003, events moved to a new stage in which operations were launched from Jerusalem itself and from the Jerusalemites themselves, simply because experience proved that the city cannot be separated from its surroundings and reality. It also cannot be neglected that Palestinian Jerusalemites, who do not have any legal affiliation to this state, are still the majority in the eastern part of Jerusalem. Indeed, their percentage reaches approximately 40% of the total population in both parts of the entire city. This clearly indicates the failure of the project to annex the land without annexing the population, which took place in 1967. Also, everything that the Palestinians went through in Jerusalem over the course of 5 decades only led in the end to the explosion of the entire Jerusalemite society, as happened in the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000. The gift of Jerusalem in 2015, and all the events that followed in 2017, 2019, and 2021.

The bottom line is that the Israeli project in Jerusalem has no horizon and cannot succeed. Indeed, the calls of the extreme right in Israel to repeat the events of the Nakba will not work at this time and are nothing more than illusions. What could have worked yesterday cannot work today. Whoever lives in a long dream must come a day when he wakes up to a reality that is completely different from what he dreamed of, and then Israel will have no choice but to do in Jerusalem what it did previously in Gaza. It has no choice but to withdraw from East Jerusalem, at least in any way, to save its very existence.